Dodd said getting the video was “really lucky.”
“You really don’t know what you’re getting out because you can’t see through the lens,” Dodd said in an interview. “But [I] was really happy to download all that stuff, and say, ‘Wow, that’s a heck of a video.’”
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The clip was recorded on June 25 as Dodd joined staff from Mystic Aquarium to search for the carcass of a 42-foot, male humpback whale as part of an effort to determine why it died, according to Dodd.
The team searched for several hours and across roughly 50 square miles before finding the whale, he said. Dodd then saw a shadow moving under the water and knew right away it was a shark, he said.
“Only about a minute later it came up towards the surface, and I said, ‘Well, son of a gun, we’ve got a white shark here,’” Dodd recalled. “So, that was pretty exciting, and [I was] pretty pumped to have one show up, because they can show up frequently, infrequently on these whales, so you never know what you’re going to get.”
The shark was curious, so Dodd decided to drop a pole camera in the water, he said.
Dodd was “able to get that classic shot of him coming literally right up to the camera to take a really close look,” he said.
“Whenever we go out, we try to bring everything that we need, and unfortunately, a huge percentage of the time it just stays in the bag because you just don’t get these kind of encounters,” Dodd said.
The shark captured on camera is an approximately eight-foot-long juvenile, according to Dodd, who said the institute has not yet been able to determine the shark’s sex based on the footage.
The whale’s cause of death has not yet been determined, Dodd said.
The video is the second clip the institute has shared online in recent weeks involving the whale carcass. In another video posted on June 26, a shark seen next to the remains, with its fin protruding above the surface of the water, is a different great white shark than the one in the more recent video, Dodd said.
Dodd said the institute is not sure if there has been an increase in great white sharks around Block Island. There are 11 acoustic receivers that detect tagged sharks, and that data will be assessed in a couple of months after it’s collected, he said.
“We do know that … when these whales die, that these white sharks seem to come out of nowhere, and so they’re around, they just don’t show themselves very often,” Dodd said.
This story has been updated to include additional comment from Jon Dodd.
Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.